A Slightly Curving Place

An Archaeology of Listening, Volume 1
Edited by Nida Ghouse in association with Jenifer Evans
Haus der Kulturen der Welt / archive books
310 pages, English
ISBN: 978-3-948212-41-4
Price: €20

Available at bookstores, mail order buying / postal shopping via the Webshop

What does it mean to listen to the past and its absence, which remains? The publication A Slightly Curving Place responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. Comprising a range of perspectives in which his propositions reverberate, the publication attends to what he does, and to the political and performative potential of the past that he opens up.

With contributions by Alexander Keefe, Umashankar Manthravadi, Vinit Agarwal, Moushumi Bhowmik, Nida Ghouse, Sukanta Majumdar, Padmini Chettur, Maarten Visser and others